Samui Bodoh

In a world of rising nationalism, hate crimes, economic dislocation, wars and killings, people being pitted against each other, uncertainty, distrust, etc, etc, etc...

it is nice to see a pair of cute, cuddly panda bears being born.

Good luck little guys, and may you have a long and (hopefully!) fertile life.

28 minutes ago, YetAnother said:

can we at least call a government spokesperson what they really are ? a professional liar

20 minutes ago, bluesofa said:

Surely, 'a professional bullshit deflector' sounds better?

How about a "Mighty Turd Polisher"?

There is an old, profound saying in my culture...

"No way he hasn't strangled at least one hooker" 

Obviously it isn't meant to be taken literally (honest!)

Hi All

I will be visiting friends and family in my native country soon, and would like to bring a series of Thai gifts and/or souvenirs. I have been doing this for years and have run out of ideas; help!

Over the years, I have brought back DVDs (from back in the day), natural soaps (these were very well received; I'd recommend them), T-shirts galore, 'elephant' pants (the thin cotton trousers that look like pajama bottoms), various teas and an occasional tea set, key chains, carved soaps (never again), etc, etc, etc.

I am out of ideas.

I am looking for two types of gifts; the first are little 'doo-dahs' or 'knick-knacks' that I can hand out to many people, perhaps with a maximum cost of 100-150 Baht. The second are a wee bit nicer things with a cost of perhaps 500-1,000 Baht; the numbers mentioned are just guidelines. 

Any and all thoughts or ideas are extremely welcome!

What do you take home for friends and family?

Cheers

SB

10 hours ago, khunPer said:

When I first visited Thailand i 1987 the beach-destination on the round trip tour was Pattaya at that time – and my memory was indeed very different from when I revisited the place late 2004 – where we stayed at the famous fairly new Royal Cliff Hotel. We – my home country girlfriend, my parents and a friend – were told not to go outside the hotel premises, except for guided tours arranged by the hotel, as it could be very dangerous "out there". We were bad customers, we did head outside on our own, and also had dinners downtown – however, we managed to survive, or perhaps it was just pure luck...

 

Last time this kind of thread was on, I posted about my daily beach walk observations, passing a number of resorts from very affordable, to that kind of multi-star "walled" places, from where you should not head out on your own, or behave against the regulations – the beach guards calls all guest up from the sea water at 6:30 pm; guest shall not swim in the sea after dark, its dangerous...????

 

The walled resort seems busy, as usual, and was very busy, if not full house, during the season. The affordable, but little up-priced level resort next to it is also busy now – at least their beach-front row of bungalows looks full house – whilst the affordable more old-fashioned bungalow resorts I pass are nearly deserted. Remember that May and June are normally low season. My own neighbor, an affordable so-called boutique hotel, looks pretty closed, with only few rooms rented out, one section complete closed down, and a restaurant that seems like the staff has given up serving dinner. Might be that its just difficult to find staff.

 

So the trend – which seem to be the reality – is that Samui guests are

• -becoming more in search for quality
• -that more people are staying in multi-star resorts, including walled ones with guarded gates, than the "old-fashioned" bungalows and hotels
• -that families, or smaller private groups, seem to prefer villas with kitchen rather than hotel rooms, or similar bungalows, or even higher end private pool-villas.

Some of the walled hi-end resorts also offers private fully serviced pool villas. All that requite staff, and I always hear that its difficult to find staff, so I don't think there is a problem finding work, for those that want to work.

 

A friend was kind of unskilled cook in an affordable beach resort that closed due to lack of guests. She was immediately offered a kitchen trainee job at a 5-star resort, where she is educated in gourmet meals, but at a higher wage than her job as cook. With a reputable multi-star resort on the CV, she could easily find well paid jobs later, if she wish to change.

 

Furthermore, all the many "workers" on Samui are only temporary here. They come for the work, and many, if not most, of them move back again. So it has been for long time, also before the tourist boom. Samui was originally inhabited with a limited number of Hainan families that first grew cotton, and later changed business plan to coconuts, when the cotton plants died. Already at that time, workers were "imported", and there has been an increasing traffic of workforce in and out of Samui ever since. Unskilled workers become skilled here, the resorts will train them how to clean rooms, and how to do this-and-that. Some have even been send to English language training as part of the job training, I know employees from for example Tesco-Lotus and Lomprayah that attended workplace paid English-school during business hours.

 

The major problem in Thailand, including Samui, is to find workers at all. Up to 10 percent of workers in Thailand are migrant workers – more, if the former unregistered workers are included – as there are not enough Thais, either available, or that want to work. The official unemployment rate is under one percent. Take for example building construction, which in most Western countries is a skilled profession, that is unskilled here, and the building constructor's foreman and team will tell the new workers what to do, and in that way train them. Often Myanmar workers are preferred in tourist business, as they can speak some level of English. However, migrant workers begin to head home, as their job opportunities are increasing with booming business and relative higher salaries in both Cambodia and Myanmar, leaving mainly Laotians to work here.

 

I cannot see unskilled workers are having a problem, but I could see that some self-employed, or small business owners, need to upgrade, or change their business to survive, or become employees. Especially if they opened a business in a field that is already crowded. The same happened in the West, and is still happening; that's called progress, I think...????

 

In general, if we can trust the statistics – we don't have anything better to replace with, apart from our individual observations – the number of incoming tourists are increasing, also for Samui, whilst the average stay seems to be decreasing, as the higher number of Asian tourists spend less days in Thailand than Western tourists, and the latter are slightly decrease for numerous reasons.

 

Apart from Chinese, that counts for some 10 million or about 30% of the total number of tourists, Indians are predicted to be in same high numbers within a few years. I notice more-and-more Indian tourists here during the last few years and they seem to get around outside the walls; that's mainly why I notice them, apart from the multi-star resort's beach. Samui is however little different from many other Thai tourist destinations. Of the total 2.7 million tourists in Surat Thani province in 2018, so including Phanang and Tao, the top-3 was:

1. 15% Chinese
2. 10% Germans
3. 10% Brits

Compared to Phuket with

1. 35% Chinese
2. 10% Russians
3. 5% Indians

or Pattaya with

1. 40% Chinese
2. 10% Indians
3. 7% South Koreans

 

I'm sure that there is a future for Samui, but in light of progress its different from the past, like the past was different from the time before the past, and so on back to the happy hippie era when Samui tourism was created...????

 

A good post as always, but while I don't disagree, I don't completely agree either.

Yes, I agree that Samui will remain a great tourist destination for a long time to come, but I don't agree on the assessment of the labour market.

First, I simply do not believe Thai statistics in general and on the labour market in particular. They may (or may not) be generally accurate, but I have seen so many contradictory numbers published (often within days of each other!) that they have lost all credibility. Further, Thai culture, with its emphasis on 'face', accepts lies/bad information at a rate which make serious, credible stats impossible. Finally, so much of the Thai economic activity is 'underground' that assessing the economic/labour situation solely based on official figures is a fools errand.

Put another way, if Thailand had actually achieved full employment (I think the usual figure for 'full' employment is 2% unemployed), then other countries would be beating a path to the kingdom in order to copy the Thai economic model, and I do not see that happening. And yes, there are several million foreign labourers about, but to assume that they are here because of a labour shortage is an assumption. I would argue that they are utilized because they are cheap labour and their purpose is to ensure that normal Thai wages don't actually rise much; if the kingdom had such a severe labour shortage as the numbers would seem to indicate, then there would be massive upward pressure on normal Thai wages, and we do not see that. To sum up, I do not agree that the main problem in Thailand is to find workers, I would argue that the main problem is that employers don't want to pay decent wages, and thus they lose their qualified and/or quality workers. 

Or, to (perhaps) over-simplify too much... The presence of cheap foreign labour isn't due to a lack of Thai labour, rather some Thai economic activity occurs due to the presence of cheap, foreign labour. And, those are very different things...

The above is on a 'macro' level, and I want/have tried to keep this thread on a more... local level.

It is a nice story of your friend who became a chef (good for her!), but like the proverbial picture of the blindfolded monks touching an elephant, other views emerge. I was at a hotel recently and was chatting (in surprisingly fluent English) with a young Burmese guy who worked there. Unusually, I asked about his wages (in my culture you never ask) and he was essentially paid in food. Yes, he had a mat on the a floor and was fed; no cash changed hands. The point that I am making is that it isn't always a lack of staff, it is a lack of salary for staff and thus when you pay people little or nothing, they don't hang around.

This is the problem in Koh Samui, and I do not see an end in sight. I don't think it matters how much training Thai staff receive here, be it Tesco, a five-star hotel, a Cheweng Beach road shop, etc; if you don't pay them a reasonable wage, they will become disenchanted and either just leave or not work to their potential. And, as my original post posited, this leads to a dissatisfied local populace. Will some leave? Yes. That said, while twenty years ago the local population was extremely transitory, I am not sure if that is still true; people begin to put down roots, and if you are a low paid worker here, you can leave, but you'll usually become a low paid worker somewhere else. so why bother? 

All of the above comes back to my original idea that Koh Samui is headed for some kind of 'Ghettoization' where the rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer, with all the social, and (possible) criminal/security implications and outcomes that brings.

I do think that Koh Samui will have a vibrant tourism business for many, many years to come, but I also think it is morphing slowly into a physically, socially, economically and class-based divided island. And, that is sad; one of the great joys of travelling is to meet local people and learn about them.

Which of us is correct? How about we resume this discussion in another five years and see where we stand?

To all the other Koh Samui members: any other issues about the island, our stay here, or anything else that you might want to bring up? 

Where do you see Koh Samui in 5 years?

In 10 years?

Cheers 

Hi All

Many thanks for all the replies! There are many responses that are at a more 'macro' level (but I will drop an opinion regardless because I am having a very slow week ????); I will try to shift focus more onto local issues later on.

@khunPer. "The true test of another man's intelligence is how much he agrees with you"... so you are one bright dude! Yes, change is constant and relative at the same time. I still recall my first visit to the island when I rented a bike and drove from Mae Nam to Cheweng. There were 'green fields' between Mae Nam and Bophut and Bophut and Cheweng. If I had had the foresight to buy up that land, I'd be dictating this post while my team of 20 hot Thai chicks were coming up with new ways to please me! Oh well... That said, I like that there are supermarkets now; to me the trick has always been to structure my life to enjoy 'Western' stuff in the mornings while enjoying the joy of Thailand in the afternoons.

@churchill. Does it matter if the tourists are Asian or Western? I have always found the gap was between locals/residents and short-timers/holiday-makers. As to your other point, I'll come back to it below.

@monk280915. I agree entirely; good post. I think other countries in the region are accelerating their tourism business at the expense of Thailand, and let's face it, they are hungrier. I dislike generalizing (which, by saying it means I am going to do it), but I think some Thais have become too jaded; one of the true initial joys of Thailand for me was the genuinely warm welcome. I still get the welcome in meeting new people, but it doesn't seem as prevalent these days. And, crumbling infrastructure; if you quintuple the rate of tourism in 20 years, you need to create/build a matching infrastructure to keep up, and Thailand has not done so...

@phetphet. Yes, the exchange rate is getting... trickier. I am not hugely knowledgeable on this matter, but I would say that it is doubly difficult for Aussies; you folks had a 20+ year run of good economic news, it'll be hard to achieve that again. It is based on no more knowledge than being a bit of a newspaper junkie, but if I were Aussie, I'd be racking my brain for coping mechanisms as I think for you it'll get worse, baring some sort of calamity in the kingdom. BTW, what happened to the black cat? Did you keep him/her?

@GalaxyMan. What can I say about the electricity? I know that we live in the same town; it is luck of the draw... You stated that "you couldn't pay me to live anywhere else" and I agree with that sentiment entirely. That said, and like many a member I think, I am wondering if I'll still be able to live here in... 10 years? It is not a financial thing (I live frugally and have been fortunate in life), but more some of the changes in the kingdom... (I am on hiatus from discussing politics, so you all can draw your own conclusions)

I want to come back to a point I made in the OP, and see if there is any further comment. When I was a kid (many, many years ago...), I went to a Caribbean island resort with my folks (I don't recall which island/country) and my most vivid memory was of the surrounding, very high, wall with broken glass embedded in the top to keep people out. Further, when we checked in, there were serious and repeated reminders to put all valuables in the resort's safe and to not leave them in the room. The resort was great, but it was totally isolated from the rest of the island; physically, culturally, sociologically, economically, etc.

I have noticed/heard that on Samui the trend is towards 'all-inclusive' places with the idea that they want to keep the guests inside their walls most of the time (@churchill) If that is the case, that will lead to less business for locals in restaurants, massage places, bars, laundry shops, etc. Further, there also seems to be a trend towards renting villas, and to me that means that people want to cook their own meals, again meaning that locals are going to lose out economically.

What is going to happen to the low/no skilled labour on the island? If the big resorts require some sort of education (and they will), what will a local guy/gal do for work in the future? It'll mean fewer tourism jobs here, and let's face it, if you live on Samui and don't work in a tourism-related business, you'll not get too far. Further, as the resorts get more and more isolated from the locals, hard feelings are going to develop, in turn leading to more security, in turn leading to even more security including the villas now, which in turn will lead to more hostility, high walls, etc. Yes, I know that I am painting an ugly picture, but this is the (very slow!) process that I see underway, based on what I saw before.

Anyone agree that ghettoization of tourism spots/hotels/beaches is the future here? If so, what are the implications?

In response to @GalaxyMan's question above, is tourism dead on Samui or is it merely concentrating on a few locales? Hmm... fewer and fewer locales?

Any other question that I should be asking that goes with this thread? Questions with a local, Samui-based theme?

Cheers all!

Please note that this thread is written for Koh Samui residents and/or long-stayers of the island. If you are in Phuket or Pattaya or Hua Hin or Bangkok or Chang Mai, etc and want to comment, perhaps you might comment in your respective local forums? Much obliged!

Hello Samui-ites! (Hmm... Samuians? Samuinese? Samui-Dudes&Dudettes?)

This is a follow-up posting to a thread I started on Xmas eve when things seemed very quiet; I did promise to return to it after Songkran, but island life... I have often said that if you are in a hurry on Samui, then you are doing it wrong. The thread I started previously focused (wrongly) on the lack of people around on Christmas Eve (everyone seemed to show up later that very afternoon), and it made me wonder what things were actually like and what is the future on the island. I also asked because I felt then, and still strongly feel now, that observations by people who live here and/or stay long periods are a truly great way to gather information; remember the adage that the plural of anecdote is data.

My observations, in no special or particular order since New Years, are as follows...

• There seems to be fewer visitors to the island. Yes, I am sure that KP and Mr T will be along shortly to tell me that I am incorrect (and I won't be arguing with them), but that is what I have seen. Hmm... I should note that I hang mostly on the North Coast, rarely go to Cheweng except on the occasional morning, and haven't been to Lamai and/or the South for a while. The simple number of people that I saw over the last 6 months or so seems lower than in past years, significantly lower. 
• The number of motorcycles un-rented seemed much higher this year; I started paying attention to them as I drove about, and this year there were always more on display than I remember. 
• A friend of mine who is a banker for local, Western People-orientated business matters/shops, is quite unhappy these days.
• I shop, for supermarket purposes, at either Tesco or Big C. Both shops seemed to have fewer customers than in previous years.
• I live in a small, short-walled compound that has five houses. Traditionally (I have been here full-time for 7 or so years and part-time for longer) I have about 30 people ask me prices, etc regarding renting the house(s). This year there was a grand total of 2 people (one of whom took the last house). 2 people. Usually about 30 people, this year 2 people.
• I see a fair amount of shops in Mae Nam/Bophut/Bang Rak with 'for sale' or 'for rent' signs. To be fair, that is the case every year after high season, but this year there are more.
• I saw a lot fewer people on my beach. Yes, guests at the hotel(s) which have beach front, but other than them I hardly saw anyone. In past years, there had been a fair amount trundling about.
• I saw many more than usual restaurants closing down and/or the usual locations not opening again.
• I read about huge numbers of Chinese in the kingdom, but I don't think that I actually saw that many on the island. That said, it is definitely possible that I simply do not go where they go. Happily, I saw fewer Chinese on motorcycles (sincere apologies to our many Chinese friends, but seeing Chinese people on motorcycles inspires terror and a dread feeling of accidents to come. Sorry.)
• Electricity on the island is much better; I haven't had a black-out all year!

Soooooo, that is some of what I have seen, roughly since the beginning of the year. I am certain that some members will come along to tell me that the numbers were much higher than I am describing, and I am not going to argue; I will merely mention the cartoon that we have all seen with the blind-folded monks touching different parts of an elephant, all stating that it is something different.

What does this mean for Koh Samui? 

If, as I am sure some will posit, tourists are moving into short-term villa rentals rather than hotels, that would explain some of the recent arrests of 'AIR BnB" villas. Hmm... Are the hotel owners grassing them? It seems to me that people move into short-term villas mainly for a kitchen, and that would mean less employment for cooks, waiters, etc (i.e., local people). I would foresee general drops in local, unskilled/low-skilled employment; waiters, cooks, cleaners, small shop keepers, laundry shops and the like. Before anyone tells me that they are still about, I agree. That said, I am speculating that their numbers are/will go down.

Employment will move into the 'all inclusive' larger hotels, and outside of these hotels/enclaves, the general surroundings will become more exclusively Thai/Burmese, with the occasional full-time foreigner (????) thrown in for good measure. Yes, I am describing a slow process whereby the divisions between the tourist and the people living on the island grow until they don't really see each other anymore; it is something that I witnessed in the Caribbean isles.

I suspect that we might see a bit more cash spent on infrastructure (good thing), but it'll be laser-focused around sites/areas/properties with posh hotels (bad thing).

Certain parts of the island are going to lag behind, and that lagging will accelerate over time. If one lives near large-scale tourist spots, life will be... er... 'speedy'. If one lives away from large-scale tourist areas, then up-grades may not occur for a while. A long while.

That is enough speculation and/or observation on my part for one day...

What say you, Samui-ites? I know that there are several permanent residents or long-stayers who don't comment often; how about sharing your thoughts this time? A long-term perspective on the island is a wonderful thing!

Any thoughts at all?

Cheers

SB

PS

On another matter...

Has anyone had a monk from the Wat in Bang Po try to sell them stuff? I am an early morning cyclist and three times now I have had him trying to sell me junk. The first day he waved me over from my bike, and since he was a monk I went over. He tried to sell me a cheap amulet. I said in my limited(!!!) Thai that I don't carry money when I cycle. Since that morning, I have seen him twice more and both times he has tried to wave me over again; I smile, semi-Wai and cycle onward. I get the honest monks, and I get the massively embezzling monks, but I don't get the monks who break their vows for a hundred Baht. 

Anyone? Is there any possible way that what he is doing is legitimate? Kind of like selling Girl Scout Cookies, maybe?

Hi Kirkster57

The above is why I say that I do not want to (ever!) argue with Ubon Joe. I see that you are new to the Forum, so I'll let you know that Joe is the resident expert on all things visa, etc. 

Notwithstanding the above, the requirements that you quoted do not really make rational sense to me, and I am used to Thai bureaucracy. I would still recommend a call, or better yet, an in-person visit to the Embassy/Consulate (there is also a consulate in Toronto if you are there) to ask what might be accepted and/or what specific form it would be required in. And, if you are anywhere west of Ontario then I recommend dealing with the Vancouver consulate; I have used them for 20 years and they take the attitude of trying to help you get what you want as opposed to not giving a rats' ass.

You are in for a... ahem... er... treat dealing with Thai bureaucracy. The good news is that after a relatively short time you will get the hang of it, the bad news is that at your stage it might be prudent to put a case on ice in advance of any dealings.

Good luck!